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It may be suggested that the decad is nothing more than so
many henads; admitting the one henad why should we reject the
ten? As the one is a real existence why not the rest? We are
certainly not compelled to attach that one henad to some one
thing and so deprive all the rest of the means to unity: since
every existent must be one thing, the unity is obviously common
to all. This means one principle applying to many, the principle
whose existence within itself we affirmed to be presupposed by
its manifestation outside.
But if a henad exists in some given object and further is
observed in something else, then that first henad being real,
there cannot be only one henad in existence; there must be a
multiplicity of henads.
Supposing that first henad alone to exist, it must obviously be
lodged either in the thing of completest Being or at all events
in the thing most completely a unity. If in the thing of
completest Being, then the other henads are but nominal and
cannot be ranked with the first henad, or else Number becomes a
collection of unlike monads and there are differences among
monads [an impossibility]. If that first henad is to be taken as
lodged in the thing of completest unity, there is the question
why that most perfect unity should require the first henad to
give it unity.
Since all this is impossible, then, before any particular can be
thought of as a unit, there must exist a unity bare, unrelated by
very essence. If in that realm also there must be a unity apart
from anything that can be called one thing, why should there not
exist another unity as well?
Each particular, considered in itself, would be a manifold of
monads, totalling to a collective unity. If however Nature
produces continuously- or rather has produced once for all- not
halting at the first production but bringing a sort of continuous
unity into being, then it produces the minor numbers by the sheer
fact of setting an early limit to its advance: outgoing to a
greater extent- not in the sense of moving from point to point
but in its inner changes- it would produce the larger numbers; to
each number so emerging it would attach the due quantities and
the appropriate thing, knowing that without this adaptation to
Number the thing could not exist or would be a stray, something
outside, at once, of both Number and Reason.
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